Canadian-American psychotherapist (1930-2014)
If I am unwilling to take responsibility for the attainment of my desires, they are not really desires--they are merely daydreams.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
Pride is the emotional reward of achievement. It is not a vice to be overcome but a virtue to be attained.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
It would be hard to name a more certain sign of poor self-esteem than the need to perceive some other group as inferior.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
There is only one reality--the reality knowable to reason. And if man does not choose to perceive it, there is nothing else for him to perceive.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
The Virtue of Selfishness
The music that inspires the souls of lovers exists within themselves and the private universe they occupy. They share it with each other; they do not share it with the tribe or with society. The courage to hear that music and to honor it is one of the prerequisites of romantic love.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
The Psychology of Romantic Love
When your principles seem to be demanding suicide, clearly it's time to check your premises.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
The Free Radical, October 2004
To attain "success" without attaining positive self-esteem is to be condemned to feeling like an imposter anxiously awaiting exposure.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
The Power of Self-Esteem
There is no value-judgment more important to a man--no factor more decisive in his psychological development and motivation--than the estimate he passes on himself.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
The Psychology of Self-Esteem
If we do have realistic confidence ... if we feel secure within ourselves, we tend to experience the world as open to us and to respond appropriately to challenges and opportunities. Self-esteem empowers, energizes, motivates. It inspires us to achieve and allows us to take pleasure and pride in our achievements.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
The Power of Self-Esteem
Self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
Fear and pain should be treated as signals not to close our eyes but to open them wider.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. When man rejects reason as his standard of judgement, only one alternative standard remains to him: his feelings. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
The Virtue of Selfishness
The ideal of romantic love stands in opposition to much of our history, as we shall see. First of all, it is individualistic. It rejects the view of human beings as interchangeable units, and it attaches the highest importance to individual differences as well as to individual choice. Romantic love is egoistic, in the philosophical, not in the petty, sense. Egoism as a philosophical doctrine holds that self-realization and personal happiness are the moral goals of life, and romantic love is motivated by the desire for personal happiness. Romantic love is secular. In its union of physical with spiritual pleasure in sex and love, as well as in its union of romance and daily life, romantic love is a passionate commitment to this earth and to the exalted happiness that life on earth can offer.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
The Psychology of Romantic Love
Never marry a person who is not a friend of your excitement.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
The Psychology of Romantic Love
If you want to obtain the strongest emotional response, then you write between the lines, never on the line; you write around the feeling, you don't spell it out explicitly. Because--if you tell the reader everything, if you don't leave spaces for the mind to fill in, if you don't engage the consciousness by giving the reader something to do--if, in effect, you try to do it all--then you leave the reader passive, the consciousness is not engaged as it could be, and so the reader is not that involved emotionally.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
Judgement Day
In the inner courtroom of my mind, mine is the only judgment that counts.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
No one is coming to save you; no one is coming to make life right for you; no one is coming to solve your problems. If you don't do something, nothing is going to get better. The dream of a rescuer who will deliver us may offer a kind of comfort, but it leaves us passive and powerless. We may feel if only I suffer long enough, if only I yearn desperately enough, somehow a miracle will happen, but this is the kind of self-deception one pays for with one's life as it drains away into the abyss of unredeemable possibilities and irretrievable days, months, decades.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
I accept the reality of my problems, but I am not defined by them. My problems are not my essence. My fear, pain, confusion, or mistakes are not my core.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
What is required for many of us, paradoxical though it may sound, is the courage to tolerate happiness without self-sabotage.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
When we do not express ourselves, do not assert our being, do not stand up for our values in contexts where it is appropriate to do so, we inflict wounds on our sense of self. The world does not do it to us, we do it to ourselves.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
Six Pillars of Self-Esteem